Why I Didn't Edge a Property This Week
- Ray DelGreco
- 12 minutes ago
- 4 min read
I was on a property this week and I didn't edge. Not one section, not a strip, the whole thing. Not because I forgot and not because I was in a hurry. I wasn't. The line between the concrete and the grass and the undergrowth just wasn't there. The St. Augustine on top looked okay in most spots, but underneath it, nothing was filling in. If I had run an edger through it that day, I'd have been cutting into a root system that was already struggling, and that's an open door for chinch bugs and fungus to get in while the grass can't fight back.
I told the customer straight up why I skipped it. She said it was fine. She appreciated it. And honestly, in most places it doesn't even look needed. It's just the result of stress, and this has been a stressful stretch of weather for a lot of lawns right now.
It's never a fun call to make. Skipping any part of a service on a property, even for the right reasons, looks like you skipped something. I've done it before, and I've seen other stewardship-minded companies do the same, for the same reason, which is that the lawn is stressed, and doing the normal thing to it would make it worse.
This Isn't About Being Behind Schedule. No one likes an ugly business card.
A while back we turned down a commercial account that would have run through a work-order platform. Potential for thousands of dollars a month in revenue for us and we were a shoe in from the start. But, the whole CMMS system was built around fixed visits, checklists, clock-in & clock-out systems, and someone at a desk deciding what "done" looked like from a screen in an office somewhere. A profile is made and a rating system is implemented based on costs and expediency. That's not how ecologically focused property care actually works. A yard doesn't know or care about your schedule and what you'd like to get done that day. It cares about soil, water, sun, stress, and human intervention, and what's actually happening on the ground that morning.
A schedule that dictates every visit requires every service, no exceptions, doesn't consider that one occurrence, edging a strip that doesn't need it on one day, is the difference between lawn progression and lawn decay. You don't want to get an infection you didn't need. The pest companies would love that, though. That's the whole reason we walked away from that kind of arrangement, and we'll keep walking away from it. At the end of the day, good maintenance means someone standing on the property, looking at what the ground is telling them, using their best judgment based on education and experience, and making a call that improves the lawn.
So Where Does This All Come From?
This is the same thinking behind GI-BMP and Florida-Friendly Landscaping, just applied at ground level on one property. Right plant, right place isn't only about what you install. It's about recognizing when a section of turf or a specific area of tge landscape is fighting a losing battle and needs something different instead of more of the same treatment.
If a strip along a driveway won't hold St. Augustine because of soil, shade, or foot traffic, the answer isn't to keep forcing it and mowing through the stress every week. The answer is to change what's growing there. A mulched bed, a different groundcover, something suited to that specific spot instead of whatever's easiest to run the same equipment over.
You look at the line where it's working and where it isn't, and you let that line tell you what the yard actually needs, instead of doing the same thing everywhere because that's what the schedule says.
The Trade-Off. Oh Boy, Here We Go.
I won't pretend this feels good in the moment. Skipping part of a service, even for the right reason, isn't something I enjoy doing either, and it's not something that happens often. But the alternative is doing damage on a schedule instead of doing right by the property needs. That's the whole difference between managing a property and just servicing an address. It doesn't mean less work, it means doing the correct work.
This is actually part of why we run subscription and package pricing with payments spread out through the year instead of billing per visit. It takes the pressure off any single stop. Skipping an edge one week doesn't cost the client anything and it doesn't cost us anything either, because we're not getting paid by the task, we're getting paid to take care of the property. That also means there are plenty of times throughout the year that we do extra because it is needed then. And using our portal/app to track what's been done and when means I can actually look at a property across a season instead of just reacting to what's in front of me that day. At the end of the day, the goal is to save our clients money and make money for us, but that only happens if we're caring for the land the way it actually needs to be cared for, not the way a fixed schedule says it should.
Ray DelGreco
SOURCES
1. Right Plant, Right Place: Understanding Turfgrass in a Florida-Friendly Landscape, UF/IFAS Extension Charlotte County
2. Southern Chinch Bug, UF/IFAS EDIS
3. 9 Principles of Florida-Friendly Landscaping, UF/IFAS
4. GI-BMP Program Overview, UF/IFAS Florida-Friendly Landscaping
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